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Comment by aantix | Hacker News Reader

There have been times in my life where I've thought that I've had a "genius" idea and every cell in my body has said "Don't tell anyone. Hoard it. Cultivate it. And you'll be a revolutionary!"

And then I end up sharing. And there never ceases to be one or two or four perspectives shared that I never thought of before. And in the end, I think the idea flourishes because I was open and shared and iterated and shared those iterations.

Do these "top secret" labs ever make the big cognitive leaps that we hope for?

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PARC gave the world Graphical User Interfaces, object oriented programming, ethernet, laser printers, precursors to PostScript, and a few other major breakthroughs.

It wasn't necessarily a "secret lab", but its distance from XEROX management on the east coast made it effectively an under the radar operation (to their detriment, of course)

Yeah not really. If you look at Sketchpad and the Mother Of All Demos you see the foundations and inventions of modern user interfaces, and C++ style objects were invented first in Simula.

So PARC was mostly just the industrialization of already known ideas and computer interactions.

Most of these only really took off once PARC shared them with other people and companies.

Big cognitive leaps? Judging by the first paragraph of the article: "the future is being imagined...It’s a place where your refrigerator could be connected to the Internet, so it could order groceries when they ran low."

the answer is "no". Of course that could just reflect a lack of imagination in NYT journalism, but really? I remember writing about that idea in early 1995 - about the same time that there was a fashion for universities to wire their Coke machines to the net, and about 5 years after Cambridge University frst wired its coffee pot to a network: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/coffee/coffee.html

> Of course that could just reflect a lack of imagination in NYT journalism

Don't underestimate that factor. Journalists, even really good ones, have no clue about technology at all.

> Do these "top secret" labs ever make the big cognitive leaps that we hope for?

Clifford Cocks discovered public key cryptography years before RSA, while he was working for Government Communications Head Quarter (GCHQ) which is an environment with (especially at the time he did it) a lot of secrecy, both from workers to the outside world but also amongst workers internally.

Who knows what else they've discovered that has not yet been released?

I'd assume that it depends on the "top secret" -ness of the lab. In a large enough top secret lab, there is a diverse enough set of perspectives to still provide the sharing culture that ideas need to flourish.

In a right-sized enough top secret lab, you can keep the "that's just too crazy, it'll never work" attitude out, while affording the isolation from real-world concerns necessary for "too crazy" to become "just crazy enough".

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